COLUMN: Goldstein – Act on gun crime now

Time to demand action on gun crime

Shame on us if we don’t do something about this cancer of gun crime on our streets.

Shame on us if we don’t demand our politicians, on both the left and right, put their usual BS aside and act.

Politicians on the left must stop pretending that harassing law-abiding hunters, target shooters and gun collectors by reviving the long gun registry or imposing bullet bans, has anything to do with stopping gangsters, armed with illegal handguns, fighting over turf and drugs on our streets.

Politicians on the right must stop pretending the social problems which lead to gangs — racism, poverty, unemployment — can be addressed solely by toughening the justice system.

Politicians on both the right and the left must end their politically correct and cowardly silence about the roots of most gang crime — the disproportionately high breakdown of the nuclear family in the black community and the alarming number of absentee fathers.

(Yes, there have been other types of street shootings in Toronto, like the recent one in Little Italy, but let’s not kid the troops. Regardless of the ethnicity of the shooter or shooters in this latest tragedy, our big problem is black gangs.)

We must demand judges use the laws and sentences we already have — we don’t need new ones — so that gangsters do real time and, pending trial, aren’t out on bail before the police have completed the paperwork in charging them.

We must demand our governments provide enough Crown attorneys, courtrooms, detention facilities and prisons, so that the justice system isn’t perpetually on the verge of imploding due to overcrowding, necessitating the constant use of plea bargains, easy bail and early parole.

Fighting urban street gangs has never been about only being tough on crime or only spending money on social programs.

It’s about doing both effectively, which doesn’t mean building more basketball courts.

It means funding programs with a proven record of building up the nuclear family — such as those now offered independently by many black evangelical churches that emphasize sexual restraint, delayed gratification, marriage, self-esteem, financial and family planning.

That said, effectively fighting urban street crime will cost us more money, both to build more prisons and to provide more support for kids living in vulnerable communities.

That’s why we should give the Toronto school board the power to tax again — subject to annual audits by the provincial auditor general — to ensure the money is actually helping kids who need it, instead of being blown installing electrical outlets at $3,000 a pop.

Right now, as the death and injury toll mounts, all we’re getting is the same old platitudes — it matters not if the mayor is Rob Ford or David Miller, or who the police chief is — about Toronto being a safe city.

Big deal. As if the only thing we should care about is that Toronto has a lower homicide rate than Detroit.

As if all that matters is that “statistically” crime is going down — as it has been all over North America since the early 1990s — for the primarily demographic reason that as our population ages, the percentage of young males most apt to commit crime also drops, thus “lowering” the crime rate.

So what? What comfort is that to the families of the dead and wounded?

We need to fight for the Toronto many of us remember — Toronto the Good — where street gunfights between gangsters shooting it out without regard to their own lives or anyone else’s simply didn’t happen, whereas today they are daily occurrences.

And if, ultimately, we don’t care enough to demand real solutions from our politicians, because, after all, it’s just a bunch of gang bangers shooting each other — no matter how many innocent bystanders they kill or wound on Danzig Street or at the Eaton Centre — then, truly, shame on us.

6 comments

First off Lorrie, we need to purge the torque phrase “gun crime” from our vocabulary. This is spin vernacular of the duty-shirking careerists who want to stigmatize lawful firearms ownership rather than put their efforts into controlling criminals.

In the reasoned optics of crime and justice there is no difference between violence caused by the criminal use of a firearm, a knife, a baseball bat, or any other item employed as an offensive deadly weapon. Deadly force is deadly force, and it has both an offensive criminal and justified defensive employment. To say one form of criminal armed violence is worse than another is intellectually fraudulent. What we saw in Toronto this summer is senseless gang violence committed with illegal weapons and authorities who are virtually helpless to stop it.

These authorities, who claim a monopoly on the use of lawful defensive force are nothing but embarrassed that their claim to the exclusive use of defensive force leaves stacks of victims. They’re incapable of protecting your life and they will jail you for protecting your own life. People are dying because their theories on crime and justice and agenda of keeping a disarmed, helpless, totally dependent population are not only dysfunctional, unjust and inhumane but immoral.

It does not surprise me that such statist immorality would scapegoat innocent, law-abiding people for the crimes of the criminal class. Target shooters and antique collectors did not mow down these victims – criminals did and they did so because the victims were left totally helpless by legislated defensive disempowerment and lack of police presence and oversight in gang ridden areas. Naturally the same type of immorality which would lay blame for this crime at the feet of the innocent will also offer draconian solutions which punish the innocent.

I have no handgun to ban, but I do have a stake in seeing this nation kept free of politicians and ideologies which are venal and dissolute enough to turn fundamntal justice on its head in attempts to hide their embarrassing record of impotency in the face of criminal sub-culture violence. If any government steals the rights and property of honest citizens because they fail to cope with criminal class violence, we have a crisis in the rule of law and justice in this nation. Politicians who are willing to scapegoat innocent people for their inability to provide reasonable public security, are of an immoral caste who deserve neither office or public trust.

I concur. The problem is not handguns or guns, be they illegal or legal, the problem is people and their criminal behaviour. The Left can be counted on to demand bans, which never work for many reasons, the main one being that determined criminals will always find ways to ignore the bans. I was even disappointed by some conservatives saying the problem is illegal handguns and that we need to find a way to prevent them from entering Canada. The truth is that even in an impossible world where no guns of any kind existed, criminals would use other means and weapons, be they golf clubs, baseball bats, home-made bats, knives or anything else, so it is impossible to ban every possible weapon.

Until and unless we are prepared the address the real issue which is people nothing will change.

I love how so-called “conservatives” demand that our politicians act on gun crime while simultaneously arguing against gun control. It’s so cute, sort of like arguing against deficit spending while demanding tax cuts but no service cuts.

ACMESalesRep, are you really that thick or just trying to troll? We already have one of the most restrictive gun controls in the world if you bother to check. That has never prevented criminals from obtaining illegal guns, which says gun control for criminals does not work. It does however prevent other citizens from being able to defend themselves, since gun control only affects people who are already law-abiding. On a final note the fact is that the problem is people, guns do not kill or wound people on their own.

Mr. Elder, with your permission I would think it is imperative to copy your comment in this section to the post concerning the ideologically driven and stupid position taken by the Ontario Attorney General.

Please tell me someone is starting a petition to remove that buffon from office. On occasion we get a glimpse of the putrid humanoid type created by leftist brainwashing. The impression is one of grotesque carricature and brings vividly to mind the famous “Caprichos” of Francisco Goya. I would question even his right of citizenship in a free country, let alone his qualifications and right to throw the weight of his office behind a senseless liberal assault on liberty. All lawyers, regardless of the function they occupy are guardians of the constitution and first and essential defenders of civil liberties. How hopelessly sick this society has become and what a monumental task to dispell the illusion and reinstate reason and common sense in the political arena.

I would like to add that, at times, I find it hard to belive that Sun Media came to exist. The fact that the liberal brainwashing did not kill completely the civil society in this country is a miracle.

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Brian Lilley is the host of Byline on Sun News Network and a senior correspondent for Sun Media's Parliamentary Bureau in Ottawa. His weekly column is published in more than 30 daily newspapers across Canada and he appears on several leading talk radio stations.